Today on Headline
RePLAY: Details on the next PlayStation are revealed, Silicon Knights
founder slams the used games market and Capcom opens its own store.
With all the attention
on what the next Xbox will (or won’t) be, what about the next PlayStation? A
reliable, but anonymous source recently revealed details to Kotaku on Sony’s
next home console: codename “Orbis.”
According to the
source, the Orbis will have an AMD x64 CPU or AMD Southern Islands GPU. The Orbis’
GPU is capable of displaying games at a 4096x2160 resolution, which Kotaku
notes is “far in excess of the needs of most current HDTV sets.”
Most likely due to Sony’s
push on 3D games and 3D television sets it’s unsurprising that the Orbis will
be able to play 3D games in 1080p in contrast to the PlayStation 3’s 720p.
Unfortunately, the
source tells Kotaku that the Orbis is not backwards compatible with any title from
the PlayStation 3. Furthermore, the new console will have “anti-used games
measures” built-in that prevents consumers from accessing the full content of a
pre-owned game.
The source explains
that new games for the console will be available either on Blu-Ray disc or as a
PSN download. Assuming the game is bought on disc, it must be locked to a
single PSN account before it can even be played. If the owner decides to trade
the game in, the pre-owned customer that buys it will either be limited to a
demo/trial mode or some other restriction and will have to pay a fee to
unlock/register the full title.
Sony hopes to launch
the Orbis in time for the 2013 holiday season, which coincided with the PS3
release in 2006.
*Source: Kotaku
Recently, Frontier
Development’s David Braben blasted the used games market by saying that it’s “killing
single player games,” and now Silicon Knights founder Denis Dyack is joining
the fray to say that used games are “cannibalizing the industry.”
“There used to be
something in games for 20 years called a tail,” Dyack explained to
GamesIndustry International, “where say you have a game called Warcraft that would sell for 10 years.
Because there are no used games, you could actually sell a game for a long
time, and get recurring revenue for quite a while. Recurring revenue is very
key.
“Now there is no tail.
Literally you will get most of your sales within three months of launch, which
has created this really unhealthy extreme where you have to sell it really fast
and then you have to do anything else to get money.”
With the “tail” cut
off, Dyack claims the existence of the industry is threatened by the used games
business.
“I would argue, and I’ve
said this before, that used games are cannibalizing the industry,” continued
Dyack. “If developers and publishers don’t see revenue from that, it’s not a
matter of hey ‘we’re trying to increase the price of games to consumers, and we
want more,’ we’re just trying to survive as an industry. If used games continue
the way that they are, it’s going to cannibalize, there’s not going to be an
industry.”
*Source: GamesIndustry International
Apparently, an e-store
and international retailers carrying their products is not enough for Capcom,
so the company is opening its own store at Odaiba, Japan on April 14th. In-store
events, sculptures and on site Wi-Fi to promote Monster Hunter are all in the works for the store.
The Capcom Store is expected
to carry, of course, Capcom products, specifically goods that were previously exclusively
found in its e-store.
*Source: Destructoid
